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The Charter ( Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium.A Physician's Charter) did not deal with just the important relationship of ...

Monday, January 30, 2017

The major barrier to third party payers control of medical costs is being dismantled

A major barrier ( I argue the major barrier) to control health care costs by the third party payers has been and still is to a lesser degree medical ethics ; more specifically, the duty of the physician to act as a fiduciary for the patient. At one time not long ago when the physician and patient believed or had determined that test x or treatment y was in the best interests of the patient the physician would be the advocate for the patient not an agent or employee of the insurance company whose interest was to deny the tests or treatment.He was not tasked with working in some type of mythical society-physician alliance to conserve collective medical resources acting as the steward of those resources.

Not infrequently the physician's desire to be the advocate of the patient and the insurance company desire to limit costs were in opposition.The patient versus the company with the physician on the side of the patient was the common narrative.

What if the medical ethics were different? What if the physician felt an ethical obligation to conserve the " resources of the collective"? What if the impetus for that ethical transformer seemed to take place from within the medical profession?

Whereas once if the physician did not advocate for his patient he might be ashamed but now according to the new ethic a physician might feel guilty by failing to act as would "stewards of finite resources". Victor Fuchs in a commentary in the NEJM carried this insult to logic to its limit in the following way.

In his closing paragraph, Fuchs tells us that when a physician works
in a health care collective in which there is a fixed annual budget
the physician resolves the dilemma ( between favoring the individual and the collective) by favoring the cost effective
option. This according to Fuchs become "appropriate". So,the cost effective choice is the appropriate
choice and also the ethical one. It is ethical in the moral calculus of
Kant he claims "because if all physicians act the same way,all patients benefit" .It is hard to find statements any sillier in a major medical journal.

A major barrier demolition occurred in 2002 with the publication of "The Charter" ( Medical Professional in the New Millennium- A Physician Charter) authored by the ABIM Foundation , the ACP foundation and a European Foundation of Internists.

A number of forays against the barrier had been made earlier including a multi part series in JAMA in which the author proposed a way to increase quality of care while decreasing cost by a egalitarian-utilitarian, cost effectiveness calculus in which the group benefited while a given individual patient might not. Notable also was the publication of "New Rules" by Troyen Brennan and Don Berwick in which they advocated elimination of the traditional doctor patient relationship and moving away from "decentralized individualized decision making".

In The Charter, three major ethical principles were put forth; patient welfare,patient autonomy and social justice. Previously medical ethics was concerned with the relationship of the physician and the patient.Now the authors of the Charter presumed to define the relationship of the physician and society. Further, the relationship they claimed was one in which the physician was the steward of society's resources. This colossal, gratuitous assertion represented a sea change the implications of which might not have been immediately apparent. To many it was not apparent that implementation of the third principle was in conflict with the first while a number raised objections the majority took little notice.The dogs barks and the caravan moves on.

But all of the above really just relates to the intellectual smokescreen. The real elements that have fee for serve on life support and thereby strike a major victory for third party's payers cost saving and profit enhancing initiatives are ACA,HITECH and now MACRA.